Health Research Roundtable: Spring 2024

The Health Research Roundtable continued in the Spring 2024 semester with three presentations by faculty and collaborators from the College of Health, P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, the College of Arts and Sciences, and Lehigh Valley Health Network. The series is open to faculty from outside the College of Health when their research interests align with the theme.

Supporting the Healthcare Transition of Young Adults with Autism
The first spring event featured the work of COH faculty member Fathima Wakeel and Lehigh Valley Health Network physician Dr. Sweety Jain: “Translating Research into Impact in the Lehigh Valley: Exploration of Multidimensional Challenges Related to the Healthcare Transition of Young Adults with Autism.”

Wakeel and Jain undertook this research to study the needs of families of young adults with autism (and other disabilities) during the transition into adult healthcare; to ask healthcare professionals about their reservations in working with this population; and to develop training programs for healthcare professionals. They discussed their methodology, results, and future directions for better preparing healthcare providers to effectively support these individuals.

Fathima Wakeel has more than 20 years of academic and research training in the maternal and child health field. Her research agenda is to produce knowledge that will help reduce racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in adverse maternal and child health outcomes. Dr. Jain holds the affiliate clinical faculty position at the COH. Her special interest has been improving the healthcare and quality of lives of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Considering Legal Classifications for Disability Law
The role that socio-legal conceptions of disability play in constructing people’s material and social realities was considered in the March event. Heather Swadley, assistant professor of political science in the College of Arts and Sciences, led a talk entitled “Disability Law Without Disability: The Politics of Classification and Dis/abled Citizenship.”

 

According to Swadley, disability categories are methods of governance, in that they perform distributive and regulatory functions on behalf of the state. However, legal classifications in many circumstances represent a Faustian bargain. Disabled people trade their dignity, privacy, autonomy, and fundamental rights for the resources they need to survive in a world that is not built with them in mind. This presentation asked: are disability categories necessary for disability law? And if not, how should we reconceptualize disability law to ensure that people's needs are accommodated? 

Swadley is a political scientist and public law scholar researching and teaching about American political development, institutions, citizenship, disability, and public policy. Her research focuses on the intersections between law, disability, race, gender, and medicine, with a focus on how medico-legal categories of disability function as tools of "governance" that regulate the lives of marginalized communities.

Using Wearable Technologies to Guide Rehabilitation 
Dhruv Seshadri concluded the series in April with “Wearable Technology and Digital Health to Guide Rehabilitation.” An assistant professor in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, Seshadri stressed the need to translate data from a reactive to proactive means for health and performance optimization and monitoring. His talk highlighted the use of wearables for rehabilitation applications ranging from anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, to patellar tendinopathies, to congestive heart failure.

Also, he discussed the need to collect data on healthy populations for model generation and how translation of such analytics is used in compromised individuals, and shared his hope for future collaborations with Bioengineering and the College of Health.

Seshadri joined Lehigh’s department of bioengineering in August 2023. His research involves the development, validation, and translation of wearable technology, bioelectronic devices, and digital therapeutics targeting human health and performance.